Pebble’s smartwatches have been success stories on Kickstarter.
Photograph: PR

“When I look five years ahead, I see computers getting smaller and smaller, and I see them really worn on our bodies. We’re going to be wearing more computers on us: I think that’s inevitable.”

You would probably say the same if you were Eric Migicovsky, who runs smartwatch maker Pebble, whose business model involves selling people computers to wear on their bodies.

Even so, Migicovsky’s confidence in the wider trend fuelling that business is notable, at a time when despite Apple and Google’s moves into the smartwatch market, there is still widespread scepticism about what exactly these devices are for.

So, what are smartwatches for? Migicovsky compares the current state of the market with smartphones in 2007, in the early days of iPhone and Android.

“There were a couple of core use cases that everyone used, and the beginnings of some new things – new experiences just squeezing into the public consciousness,” he says.

For smartwatches in 2015, those core use cases appear to be activity-tracking and notifications – 90% of Pebble owners use notifications every day, according to Migicovsky – with watch-face customisation also scoring highly in Pebble’s case.

He points out that there are already more than 6,000 faces available on Pebble’s app store, while an app to create your own watch face has been used more than 300k times.

“People love customising their device: if you walk around and see people using a Pebble, they’ll be using a different watch face. It’s a little Swatch-like element: except where you used to buy different $50 or $100 Swatches, now you’re customising and swapping digital watch faces,” he says.

It’s worth noting that Pebble’s use of customisation as a key feature also highlights a difference to the Apple Watch, which for now doesn’t have downloadable faces.

Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky.

Migicovsky also mentions Pebble’s vibrating alarm-clock – which wakes people up quietly in the morning by buzzing on their wrist – as a popular feature, thus highlighting Pebble’s longer battery life compared to the Apple Watch’s need for a nightly charge.

As the independent underdog in the current smartwatch market – albeit one of the first to get out of the kennel with a commercial product – Pebble needs to shout about its advantages. But Migicovsky is just as willing to speculate about how smartwatches will evolve to become much more useful to a wider range of people in the years ahead, just as smartphones did before.

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“On the early iPhone and Android devices you had some core usage: mobile browser, maps, messaging, YouTube,” he says. “But now, years later, we have Uber, Spotify and all these interesting things

“We’re focusing on building a core platform that provides a ton of value to people daily. We’re building something that we want to stay on people’s wrists, and provide the platform on which other developers can build early examples of what the future will be.”

He cites a project called Nightscout, which connects smartwatches to glucose monitors worn by people with diabetes, to display their blood-sugar levels on their Pebble.

“Instead of using their bulky computer that’s kinda awkward and the size of a deck of cards, they can see that information on their wrists. Thousands of people are now using this, but it wasn’t something we came up with. It wasn’t even on our radar,” he says.

For similar reasons, Migicovsky is bullish about Pebble’s plans for “smartstraps”: replacement straps for its smartwatches, made by external developers and startups, that add new features. The company announced plans for a $1m fund to help turn the best ideas into commercial products earlier in the year.

“Because of the size constraints, we can’t really shove everything and the kitchen sink into the watch, so there are things like sensors, functionality and features that we wanted to explore that we couldn’t fit in,” he says.

“We’ll see smartstraps for those soon. The majority of people might not want a pollution sensor, an extra-long battery or a gesture detector or IR blaster, but people are experimenting [with] putting these kinds of technologies together. They were doing this with Pebble from a software perspective, but from a hardware perspective it wasn’t really open until now.”

One of the most intriguing aspects of a smartwatch is whether it can help us stay more connected to the people and the world around us: a device that makes us spend less time looking at a screen, not more – a rarity in the modern mobile hardware market.

Where does Pebble stand on this? Migicovsky says he checks his phone much less often than he used to – “I’m a little bit less stressed” – but admits that his company could be doing more to tap in to this trend.

“We have room to grow in regard to how we filter notifications, and how we let you disconnect when wearing a Pebble. It’s that ambient-computing aspect of it, where you’re not actively sitting at a desk, so it needs to mesh more into your life,” he says.

“With wearables, we have an ultimate opportunity, as well as a responsibility, to curate and nurture that ambient computing feeling.”

Can devices like the Pebble Time make us look at our smartphones less? Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian

Pebble will still face questions about whether it has the long-term runway for this kind of nurturing. The company batted off reports of stretched finances earlier in the year, but the competition posed by Apple Watch and Google’s Android Wear partners is a real challenge.

Migicovsky is happy to take the fight to both those rivals. “Pebble is the Swatch of smartwatches on iPhone: it’s affordable, smaller, lightweight and colourful, and it’s customisable. It’s different to the Apple Watch,” he says, of the comparison with Apple Watch.

Android Wear? “That’s a different ball-game, but Pebble, in terms of functionality, feature-set, battery life … a whole number of things, is starting to be well-recognised in the market. It’s waterproof, and it can do more than Android Wear,” says Migicovsky.

Compare that to the nightly charging required for the Apple Watch, or the two-day battery life that’s become standard for Android Wear devices. “Less than 1% of our users charge every night,” says Migicovsky.

But it’s early days for this category, both in terms of the battery life that can be squeezed out of non e-paper smartwatches, and in figuring out the expectations of owners: will they be happy to trade increased performance for a nightly or bi-nightly recharge?

Still, Pebble is looking ahead, which is how Migicovsky ends up talking about the inevitability of wearing more computers on our bodies.

“As to where Pebble fits in that environment: we’re one of the companies that are wearables-first, and we’ve built an operating system that runs on a tiny controller,” he says.

“We’re building what 30 years ago would have been inside a desktop computer, and now is on your body. Over the next couple of years, our mission is to bring more and more technology to your body. But a smartwatch doesn’t replace your smartphone.”

The latter is clearly a key principle for Pebble, emphasised when Migicovsky defines the company against rivals “just taking a smartphone and putting it on your body”. But he admits that some of the apps that he hopes will make smartwatches more useful may have been seen before on smartphones. It’s just that they’ll make much more sense on the wrist.

“You could have used Uber on a desktop or laptop to manage your cabs, but on a smartphone it took off in a way that it probably never would have if it was just on your computer,” he says.

“Smartwatches and wearables open a new opportunity in exactly the same way: things that you could have done on your smartphone, but which are much more awesome on a wearable. Activity-tracking is one of the first examples of that.”

So the search for the killer app goes on … “It’s not about finding a killer app in my opinion,” says Migicovsky, politely but firmly.

“Once Pebble is on people’s wrists, once it’s helping people exchange notifications, keep track of the people they care about, and manage their day, that’s when the next phase kicks in, and people start imagining what the next generation of services will be,” he says.

“Don’t think of it as a killer app. Pebble doesn’t have a single killer app: it’s the platform. Most people can’t live without their phones right now. In the future, we expect that people will not be able to live without their wearable.”